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EDITORIALS
 Confusing Issues
The Jain report has unnecessarily become a critique of Indian
diplomacy. It will be facile to see the Jain Commission
imbroglio as just another cynical political game. In truth, the ramifications go far
deeper. For one, Justice M.C. Jain has confirmed what was once India's worst kept secret:
that through the '80s, the government of this country effectively sponsored the terrorism
of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. Deposing before the Jain
Commission, a variety of senior functionaries, including former prime ministers, attempted
to excel each other in unveiling the manner in which the LTTE used India as a safe haven
cum training camp. While much of the government's Sri Lanka policy in the past decade
cannot be condoned, it is regrettable that Jain has, clumsily and crudely, brought into
public gaze documents that can be profoundly damaging to India's strategic interests. Jain
had been provided official records to help him understand the larger and largely
tangential drama to which Rajiv Gandhi's assassination was a climax. Such information
should never have formed part of his report, which was meant to investigate a murder
rather than critique Indian diplomacy.
True, the correctness of the then Indian government's attitude to the LTTE is
debatable. Even so, that is a matter for historians to unravel, not a judicial commission.
Covert operations, undesirable as they may be in theory, are part of statecraft. The
imperatives which go into shaping a nation's exchanges with its external environment are
that nation's privilege. They are not there for the world to see. When John F. Kennedy was
assassinated, the Amercian government didn't make public details about the Cuban crisis.
There is a crucial difference between a government and a public library; the artless
Justice Jain has failed to fathom it. Some of the damage can still be undone if Parliament
agrees to have put before it only those portions of Jain's report which are relevant to
Rajiv's assassination. Let issues not be confused further -- nor India compromised.
 Society
Strikes Back
Politicians who have reduced bandhs to compulsory public holidays
must suffer.
The Supreme Court's order upholding a Kerala High Court judgement that bans bandhs is
in line with a new social spirit which seeks to define the border between the citizen's
right and his responsibility. In 1967, when the Calcutta High Court ruled that gherao
(EIEGE) was illegal, contemporary society was not in agreement with the spirit of the
judgement. Ideas about the permissible limits of protest have changed since then. Most
political parties have, for example, accepted the 1996 judgement of the Bombay High Court
that upheld the right of a company to refuse salaries to employees engaged solely in trade
union activity. The Supreme Court order reflects this sentiment as it tells the Marxists
that their trademark method of protest is illegal. The Constitution guarantees the right
to form associations and to assemble peacefully. But this is by no means a licence to
paralyse normal life. The Kerala High Court judgement had, with a touch of irony,
mentioned that "the state withers away" on bandh day.
Since the Marxist Government of E.K. Nayanar assumed power in Kerala in June 1996,
there have been as many as 15 bandhs. Nayanar still had the gall to argue before the high
court that the bandh was "a communication of ideas" and should, therefore, be
protected under the right to freedom of speech and expression. This irresponsible attitude
to public order has been the bane of the two leftist states of Kerala and West Bengal,
choking off investments, hampering growth -- and traumatising the citizenry. West Bengal
Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, known to be a reformer at heart, should take the cue from the
apex court's order and persuade his party's trade union to call off its proposed general
strike on December 17. There are sure to be some people who do not share the strikers'
cause. Why should the state wither away for them without their asking it to? |
